Slabs like this pair caught at Fort Gibson by J.T. Griffin can be found at lakes within a short drive of either Tulsa or Oklahoma City. Photo courtesy of Jeff Phillips.

It's February, and while Old Man Winter will be at his miserable work on and off for a while yet, spring is coming.

And that's something for Sooner State crappie anglers dreaming of a fish fryer filled with a limit of scrumptious crappie filets to look forward to -- even if those slab fanciers happen to find themselves living right smack-dab in the middle of the Oklahoma City and Tulsa metropolitan areas! And in today's world of high-priced gasoline, reports of top-quality fishing close to home should certainly come as welcome news.

OKLAHOMA CITY CRAPPIE WATERS
According to Kurt Kuklinski, a fisheries research biologist at the Oklahoma Fishery Research Lab in Norman, two waters that should interest crappie anglers come immediately to mind: Arcadia Lake and Lake Thunderbird.

Lying a mere 15-minute commute from downtown Oklahoma City, the first of those covers 1,800 acres near Edmond. "Historically, (Arcadia) has had an overpopulated, stunted crappie population," Kuklinski said, "but our most recent netting samples are showing that is no longer the case. Now we're seeing a good quantity of fish, and we're seeing large fish, crappie more in the 10- to 12-inch range that our anglers are targeting."

Why is that? "It's probably forage-related," he proposed. "We have a lot better forage base out there now, shad wise. And to some degree, our anglers have helped us. When it was a stunted population, we encouraged anglers to harvest a lot of the stunted fish so that the leftover fish would grow bigger."

The municipal water-supply lake's level is subject to fluctuation, but at press time, Arcadia was, in Kuklinski's words, "a good 5 feet down." Despite that, the small venue continues to support a serviceable quantity of crappie-friendly habitat.

"It's basically two small rivers that are dammed up to create the lake, so it has a good water-depth change throughout," Kuklinski explained. "In the uppermost reaches of the lake, it's a lot more shallow and turbid, but downlake toward the dam the water becomes a lot clearer and has a lot more depth."

The biologist reported that fisheries crews' netting samples generally reveal the most crappie off the lake's rocky points, bedrock, and boulder/cobble areas in the deeper water of the lake's lower half. He also pointed out that the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation has installed a number of fish attractors in the lake.

"We put in cedar trees to attract fish for the anglers, and we have a covered fishing dock at one of the boat ramps," Kuklinski said. "There is some habitat in there (at the fishing dock), and anglers do really well there throughout the winter and into spring."

As a general rule, Kuklinski stated, Arcadia gets "fired up" for spring crappie angling within the mid-to-late-April timeframe. "That's when the fish begin to move up shallow and become accessible to shore-anglers," he said. "When they do, they're active, and will bite just about anything. A lot of the anglers that I've talked to will use one rod with a minnow and a slip-bobber rig and another rigged with a jighead that has a small 2-inch Mr. Twister style plastic curlytail grub or a Sassy Shad on it. They'll bite those as readily as they will live bait."

The second OKC-area crappie lake that Kuklinski recommends is Lake Thunderbird, a 6,000-acre water body to the east of Norman. "Again, we're basically talking about two rivers that are dammed up," he said, "so there are basically two arms on Thunderbird, which is almost a horseshoe shaped lake. As you get uplake toward the rivers, the lake is a little more turbid, shallow, and has some timber. But once again, as you get downlake, the water is a lot deeper, and it clears up."